Giving credit to the world's first travel blog post, 20 years ago

Travel blogs have been around for a long time now . . . two full decades.  At first it seems like a no brainer that the content in these blogs are a gold mine for travel dreaming or planning.  But in practice, that's not often the case.  I'm on the fence whether I like them or not when it comes to planning travel.

With the exception of asking a few trusted friends, I do pretty much all my destination planning, travel research, and bookings online.  In fact, most of my destination planning is done through online resources, whether they be official destination sites, review sites, or random travel blogs.

When visiting travel blogs though, there's something about them that makes me have a love-hate relationships with them.  When they're good, they're often times phenomenal . . . packed with vivid imagery and seducing descriptions that captivate me enough to open a new tab and start booking flights.  In these cases, the blogger usually possesses a genuine curiosity in the local surroundings and seeks out the unconventional to broadcast back to viewers.

When travel blogs are bad though, they can really be a waste of time.  Regurgitated information and non-descriptive words like "amazing" or "awesome" can render a sensory travel experience incredibly bland.  What's amazing or awesome to one person may not be the case to me.  So I move on to the next blog, and the next, and the next, until finally I stumble upon some more unique, descriptive, and inspiring content.

But for better or worse, I have to pay mad respect to the birth of travel blogging.  Jeff Greenwald holds the title for posting the world's first travel blog back in January 1994.  It took over three hours over dial up Internet to post.  It's called "One Hundred Nanoseconds of Solitude" and you can read it here.

Fast forward to today, twenty years later, and there's no shortage of travel content written by bloggers roaming the planet and sharing every aspect of travel imaginable.  Now if only there was a way to search through all the world's haphazard travel blogs as quickly and accurately as one searches on Google for relevant content!!

One of my fav travel blog posts comes from wanderingearl.com, about how not to get ripped off by taxis.